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Beyond Brown v. Board
VUE Number 4, Summer 2004
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EXCERPT:
The Bad News and Good News about Brown
By Richard D. Kahlenberg
Richard Kahlenberg is a Senior Fellow at The Century Foundation.
> Author's biography
Racial integration – the remedy mandated by the Brown decision – may no longer be the most appropriate solution for racial inequality in public schools. Instead, some school districts are attempting what promises to be a more effective strategy: integrating students by income, rather than by race, to improve achievement.
As we commemorate the fiftieth anniversary of the landmark Brown v. Board of Education decision, there is bad news and there is good news. The bad news is that the legal levers provided by Brown to promote school integration have been largely exhausted, and research finds that racial school segregation is on the rise. The good news is that a growing number of districts are adopting an innovative kind of school integration plan — based more on socio-economic status than on race — and a large body of scholarship suggests that these new plans are even more likely to fulfill the ultimate promise of Brown: equal educational opportunity for all students.
The Bad News: The Decline of Racial Integration
When Brown v. Board of Education was decided in 1954, people concerned about school equity were jubilant. Thurgood Marshall, who argued the case before the Supreme Court, estimated it would take no more than five years to desegregate the entire country (Patterson 2001). But with the Brown II decision in 1955, there were years of delay, hung on the Court's declaration that desegregation should occur with “all deliberate speed.” It wasn't until the late 1960s that the courts became serious about enforcing Brown. For a brief period, desegregation progressed substantially, particularly in the South, where schools became the most integrated in the country.
But the hopes for nationwide desegregation were dashed with the Supreme CourtÕs 1974 ruling in Milliken v. Bradley. In the 5–4 decision, the Court held that because the Constitution only disallows purposeful, de jure segregation, suburban school districts not directly responsible for segregation must be excluded from desegregation orders involving city schools.
The decision had two devastating effects. First, White parents with financial means now had an easy escape route if they wished to avoid integrated schools — by moving to the suburbs — which they did in droves. Today, White students are a minority — usually a tiny minority — in all but one (Salt Lake City) of the twenty-six largest central city school districts (Frankenberg, Lee & Orfield 2003). Second, as middleclass families (of all races) moved to suburban communities, racial desegregation increasingly became a workingclass phenomenon. In places like Boston, low-income and working-class Whites were mixed with low-income and working-class Blacks, while upperincome Whites living in suburban areas were exempt from the enterprise.
The limitation imposed by Milliken severely inhibited the potential for racial desegregation to produce academic gains. Why? Because academic achievement is tied to a schoolÕs economic mix more than to its racial mix. The famous Coleman report of 1966, for example, found that the “beneficial effect of a student body with a high proportion of White students comes not from racial composition per se but from the better educational background and higher educational aspirations that are, on average, found among whites” (Coleman et al. 1966, p. 307). As a result,Coleman noted, poor Blacks would not benefit academically from attending schools with poor Whites.
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Archives
Beyond Brown v. Board
VUE Number 4, Summer 2004
| VUE Home | Archives | Order Print Copy |
EXCERPT:
The Bad News and Good News about Brown
By Richard D. Kahlenberg
Richard Kahlenberg is a Senior Fellow at The Century Foundation.
> Author's biography
Racial integration – the remedy mandated by the Brown decision – may no longer be the most appropriate solution for racial inequality in public schools. Instead, some school districts are attempting what promises to be a more effective strategy: integrating students by income, rather than by race, to improve achievement.
As we commemorate the fiftieth anniversary of the landmark Brown v. Board of Education decision, there is bad news and there is good news. The bad news is that the legal levers provided by Brown to promote school integration have been largely exhausted, and research finds that racial school segregation is on the rise. The good news is that a growing number of districts are adopting an innovative kind of school integration plan — based more on socio-economic status than on race — and a large body of scholarship suggests that these new plans are even more likely to fulfill the ultimate promise of Brown: equal educational opportunity for all students.
The Bad News: The Decline of Racial Integration
When Brown v. Board of Education was decided in 1954, people concerned about school equity were jubilant. Thurgood Marshall, who argued the case before the Supreme Court, estimated it would take no more than five years to desegregate the entire country (Patterson 2001). But with the Brown II decision in 1955, there were years of delay, hung on the Court's declaration that desegregation should occur with “all deliberate speed.” It wasn't until the late 1960s that the courts became serious about enforcing Brown. For a brief period, desegregation progressed substantially, particularly in the South, where schools became the most integrated in the country.
But the hopes for nationwide desegregation were dashed with the Supreme CourtÕs 1974 ruling in Milliken v. Bradley. In the 5–4 decision, the Court held that because the Constitution only disallows purposeful, de jure segregation, suburban school districts not directly responsible for segregation must be excluded from desegregation orders involving city schools.
The decision had two devastating effects. First, White parents with financial means now had an easy escape route if they wished to avoid integrated schools — by moving to the suburbs — which they did in droves. Today, White students are a minority — usually a tiny minority — in all but one (Salt Lake City) of the twenty-six largest central city school districts (Frankenberg, Lee & Orfield 2003). Second, as middleclass families (of all races) moved to suburban communities, racial desegregation increasingly became a workingclass phenomenon. In places like Boston, low-income and working-class Whites were mixed with low-income and working-class Blacks, while upperincome Whites living in suburban areas were exempt from the enterprise.
The limitation imposed by Milliken severely inhibited the potential for racial desegregation to produce academic gains. Why? Because academic achievement is tied to a schoolÕs economic mix more than to its racial mix. The famous Coleman report of 1966, for example, found that the “beneficial effect of a student body with a high proportion of White students comes not from racial composition per se but from the better educational background and higher educational aspirations that are, on average, found among whites” (Coleman et al. 1966, p. 307). As a result,Coleman noted, poor Blacks would not benefit academically from attending schools with poor Whites.
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